Warp 4 21 1/2" x 21 1/2" Designed and made by Connie Kauffman
I hope you've been enjoying the Try a Tool Blog Hop with the Island Batik Ambassadors. This is actually the very last day of the hop! This month's challenge is with the Island Batik new Spring 2021 fabrics and rulers from Studio 180.
Each of the Ambassadors were given fabrics from one of the new Spring lines and a ruler from Deb Tucker's Studio 180. The fabrics I received were from the Collection Sun Kissed Soleil. This line was designed by Kathy Engle for Jackie Kunkel of Canton Village Quilt Works. This is a beautiful collection with 20 different fabrics.
The ruler I received from Studio 180 to work with is called Corner Beam. This is a sweet little 3 piece block.
What I think is the best thing about this ruler is that you can make the block in 11 different sizes from 1" to 6". Many rulers out there only make one size, so this is a great ruler you can use multiple times. I like to make small quilts so it is wonderful to find rulers that can be used to make small block sizes.
Another great thing about Studio 180 rulers is that they are made "slightly" bigger and then they are cut down to size. What I like about this is the accuracy of the blocks and also how little fabric is wasted in making the blocks as the trimming really only cuts off a small sliver of excess fabric.
Here is a photo of three different sizes I tried using the Corner Beam block made with the Studio 180 ruler. The blocks are 1", 2" and 3" finished sizes.
I ended up using 8 fabrics from the collection in my design, plus solid black and a green from the Flutter Fly collection as I wanted to pull out the green in a few of the fabrics. I also used a great multi colored print from the collection for the backing.
Sometimes it is fun to take a whole collection and make a quilt using as many fabrics in the collection that you can. This is great for a sort of scrappy, big, multi block quilt. I wanted to make a small quilt with many of the corner beam blocks, so I was selective in what fabrics I picked from the collection for this project. I'll let you in on a few thoughts of why I didn't select some of the other fabrics for this quilt.
Below are the fabrics I didn't use.
The first three on the left were similar in color and print to the three I had selected for the quilt.(See the photo above this one)
The next three are black and white prints. I already picked out a black and white print in stars Two of these fabrics are actually pretty large prints- you loose the beauty of these designs when they are cut very small.
The orange and one of the black fabrics are the same printed design. I hesitate to have the same design print as several fabrics in the same quilt, and I had that print in the multicolored fabric in the first photo. I also had decided on a solid black as it would stand out more in the quilt, so I didn't need the two black on black fabrics.
The last two fabrics are lovely multi colored prints. These also do not show up well when cut into small pieces unless you are doing something scrappy.
These are all wonderful fabrics that will be put back for future projects and also the giveaway at the end of the blog.
The quilt uses two sizes of the Corner Beam block. A three inch size in the center of the quilt and 2" sizes in the other corners. Having some different colors in the blocks was a bit more challenging than the general directions. I also realized that some of the cutting of long strips wasn't necessary when you were only making a few blocks of each color. I hate to waste fabric, so had to think a bit so I didn't cut off more fabric than needed.
I added prairie points to the border and buttons for extra embellishments.
Do you ever have trouble naming your quilts? I make a lot of quilts and sometimes I run out of ideas for names. This time my kids were home and we had a brain storming of what to name this quilt. Some ideas tossed out were that it had lots of stars- so "Starry, Starry Night" was one name. The stars, the arrows pointing in and the corner beams got them thinking of space and motion and - STAR TREK! Thus the name Warp 4 evolved. Do you think it fits?
One of the Island Batik sponsors is Aurifil thread and I used 4 different colored spools with this quilt. The colors matched wonderfully.
